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"Do not stop him,” Jesus said, “for whoever is not against you is for you.” 

8/26/2016

2 Comments

 
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“Master,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he is not one of us.” “Do not stop him,” Jesus said, “for whoever is not against you is for you.” Luke 9: 49-50 NIV
 
The other day I read an article from a church paper that was about “Church Security and Safety”.  I am not going to list the article or the names of the church security companies that were listed in the article because I don’t want anyone to think that I am trashing these companies or their training techniques.  Just like Christ says in Luke 9:50 “Do not stop him,” … “for whoever is not against you is for you.”  Educating churches on the dangers of a fallen world is the importance of any article like this and it started off with the basic education of why churches need a security/safety team.  The article interviewed someone from a security company that goes around training church volunteers on how to handle situations facing churches today. They went on to say that “If state law allows licensed gun owners to carry firearms on church property then the church should look into having an armed, trained security team. “In addition to armed personnel the church should have a team trained in hand-to hand combat, de-escalation techniques, the use of pepper spray and expandable batons.”
 
I am going to give you a second to re-read that last statement.  Now let’s take the last part of that sentence apart.  First, hand-to-hand combat.  In our training we don’t recommend hand-to-hand combat training.  Here is the reason.  Unless a person frequently practices their hand-to-hand combat moves and in the mist of combat you have to think whether it is “wax on or wax off” you’ve already been “waxed”. I am not against martial arts, we have several members on our safety team that study martial arts and are very good at it.  Almost all of them tell me it has to be second nature before hand-to-hand combat moves become instinctive and instantaneous.  I watched an instructor give a 2-hour course to safety team members of a church on how to take a knife away from a person. Most of the team members were out of shape and over aged and all that did was give those safety team members a false sense of security that will only get them hurt unless they practice the moves.  When I asked a friend who is a martial art expert what he would do if he was confronted with a person with a knife; his response was to shoot them.  I believe if you can’t do what my friend said, you use whatever you have at your disposal; a chair, a Bible or anything you can get your hands on to get some distance away from that person until help arrives, not go hands on.
 
To me de-escalation techniques are the most important tool you can learn and use in a church environment.  If you don’t believe me go out and read this article.  One Sunday afternoon Pastor John Johnson III, with Corinth Missionary Baptist Church in Bullard, TX, was confronted with a man wearing camouflage pants, a tactical vest, helmet with a pistol.  The assailant stated that he was a “man of Islam” and instructed to “slay the infidels”, anyone that did not abide by the teachings of Islam.  Pastor Johnson, who had worked in corrections, feared that a lot of people were going to get hurt unless he took matter into his own hands.  Pastor Johnson asked the suspect to sit down and let him pray for him and get him a cool drink.  Keeping calm, he was able to alert the others to get out of the church and call the police.  Pastor Johnson was also able to get away from the suspect and later after the suspect was arrested the church found a note written by the suspect that stated, “This house is blessed by God”.
 
We are “church safety” and in a situation of a disruptive attending, taking someone to the mat is the last thing we want to do.  People are broken and unless they are possessed, a calm head goes a long way.  In fact, to use words from a popular 80’s movie, “All you have to do is follow three simple rules. One never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected.  Two, take it outside.  Never start anything inside the “house of worship” (used my own words here) unless it’s absolutely necessary.  And three, be nice”. Let me add one more thing to number three, who are you working for?  You are working for the Lord Jesus Christ and not only should you be nice, you also have to be humble.  Anger has no place here and when you get angry and lose your temper, you lose the fight.
 
The part of the statement I have the most problem with is, “the use of pepper spray and expandable batons”.  I know the company in this article meant well but my question is, have they ever been in a room where pepper spray has been deployed?  Most pepper sprays are an aerosol.  Once deployed it spreads and do you know what pepper spray will do to an elderly person with respiratory issues? You’ve just released an irritant in the air that “causes non-lethal inflammation of all mucus membranes in the eyes, nose, mouth and lungs.  Pepper spray causes eyes to slam shut from intense burning and temporary blindness.  The effects will last from 30 minutes to 2 hours (1).  The extendable baton is nothing more than (as Wikipedia puts it) a club carried for self-defense and when used properly is a great tool, as pepper spray is, for police officers and those trained in the use of said tools. 
 
But if you want to quickly get on your local news, CNN or Fox News for the wrong reason use pepper spray or an extendable baton on a disruptive attendee that is refusing to leave your worship center.  Most likely you will get the disruptive attendee to leave but if you use pepper spray, you will also have your elderly in your worship center calling out for medics because they can’t breathe or see. You will also clear out your church service.  Nobody wants to see their elderly being rolled out on gurneys to the paramedic truck because of the deployment of the pepper spray.  Nobody wants to see video that someone took with their phone of your safety team member using an extendable baton and then it shows up on YouTube.  This is not going to be a good image for your church or your safety team and this all happened because you decided to use something other than verbal judo or the necessary force needed to remove the disruptive attendee.  When it’s all over, you then have to worry about civil suits against your church because of the actions you took.  Not to mention, striking someone with an extendable baton will get you arrested unless of course you live in Mississippi. 
 
Think about it brothers and sisters, “be nice” and if that doesn’t work, it might require 10 members from your church to remove the disruptive attendee but no one gets hurt but maybe the disruptive attendee.  Your church leaders will thank you for the way you handled the situation.
 
In the final paragraph of this article another church security consultant stated “for churches with an active shooter in their building is to go wild on this person… There has to be a group of men sitting strategically that are just going to go berserk and rise up against this person and go after him.”  Going wild or berserk is not the way to go after an active shooter.  In our church, safety team members with carry concealed permits, have other jobs on the team unless I have seen them shoot.  Just like hand-to-hand combat, unless you go out and shoot and train at least twice a month or more you should never pull your weapon in a crowded church. And when we talk about training I am talking moving and shooting, not standing in a lane and shooting at paper targets.  Doing training with a qualified firearms instructor that teaches you how to respond in stressful situations.  It takes police officers years of practice to perfect shooting under stress and pressure. A little unknown statistic, 30% of shots fired by police officers actually hit their target.  That is a mighty low percentage.  What that means is if you get involved in a church shooting and your under high stress, the attacker is shooting back at you and you fire three rounds at the suspect. There is a high probability that at least two of those rounds are not going to hit the bad guy.  In a full church where do those rounds go?  Another church member gets hit or God forbid a child and you have to live with that the rest of your life.  I see church after church only requiring their members to have a conceal weapons permit to carry.  If you are the team leader on your safety team, it is your responsibility to make sure they can shoot before you recommend them carrying in your church. 
 
Calm heads and hours of training are needed to learn how to assess and neutralize the threat in the most effective way and with the least collateral damage as possible.  If the threat ends up becoming a gun battle you want calm, trained and godly men standing up for your congregation. Not someone that is happy to be on the safety team because he gets to carry a gun for the Lord going berserk on the active shooter.  Having someone on the safety team pull a weapon that is untrained to neutralize a threat could get innocent people killed and destroy your church. We are called to protect the flock, connect people to Christ and if necessary give our lives for our calling.  Besides to use another phrase in that popular 80’s movie “nobody ever wins in a fight”.  
 
(1) www.pepper-spray-store.com/pages/effects-pepper-spray

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I’d like to hear your thoughts…….Post your comments below.
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2 Comments
James Maute
8/27/2016 06:35:56 am

I read your article several times to digest what you said. Since we are not a police force I agree we should stay away from pepper spray and especially the baton as it is too easy to kill someone with an illegal strike. I do think that training on proper hand escort techniques is important as it provides a safer way to remove someone from the building with less risk to yourself or members of the congregation. Because of our genetic makeup learning verbal de-escalation should be one of the most important things that we spend time on when we train our teams. Sounds easy, but you need to practice to be able to respond to someone in a non threatening way or you will quickly cause a problem to escalate out of control.

I do disagree with you on the active shooter. In a large church you probably have enough men with law enforcement or combat training to take on the bad guy. But, from my experience the average church is under 200 people including women and children. Take away the choir, teachers, deacons, and ushers and you are lucky to find six men who will devote themselves to a security ministry. By this I mean taking the time to meet regularly, work out plans and procedures and train together. I believe that this ministry is so important that you have to be 100% committed. This is the only position in the church where you cannot afford to make a mistake. At a former church I attended we had four people on our team sitting strategically during the preaching to stop a possible threat.

As a small church we required that armed members of our team read and sign a use of force agreement, shoot at the range quarterly, carry approved weapons and ammunition, attend meetings to go over different scenarios, and meet with the Assistant Commonwealth Attorney for our city to discuss what we could or could not legally do to protect our church. Even as a police officer we only went to the range twice a year. Most civilians do not live in an area where they can shoot a combat course so the shooting range is where most of us practice.

I believe that if a shooter is actively killing people inside your church you do have to go wild to stop the threat. The killing will continue until it is stopped. The Dangerfield Texas shooting is a good example where unarmed men rushed the shooter and paid with their lives to protect their friends. I would rather have a small security team with limited training attempting to stop the shooter than be hiding under a pew waiting to be shot.

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Jim Howard link
8/28/2016 06:35:40 pm

James,

I really appreciate your response. I not really sure where we disagree except maybe our definition of going wild. Looking up wild I find "uncontrolled or unrestrained" and that is the last thing I want in a safety team member confronting anyone in church crisis. If you felt in any way that I am against armed volunteers or that we are not armed in our church, I apologize for that perception. My comments were to reinforce training. You have to have some type of firearms training before allowing just anyone on your safety team to come into the church armed. Your church seems to be on the right track because you state you have your armed members read and sign a use of force agreement and shoot at the range quarterly. It sounds like your church does a lot of training. Still not sure where we disagree. I just don't want someone in my church that has never had some stress put on them in shooting going “wild” on anyone, especially in a church. I notice there is a range near you, Colonial Shooting Academy, that teaches combat style shooting of moving and shooting. This would be great for any church safety team.

As I said, if you felt that we are not going to go after a shooter that was my mistake in the blog. We have sworn and non-sworn that carry in our safety team and I have taught many of them in tactical shooting. We even have locations in our church that are specifically set up for our armed safety members to be able to confront a shooter with the best tactical advantage possible.

We have to use what we have. If all you have is a small security team with limited training, then you use them to the best of their ability. You stated that you shoot quarterly, that is more that most small departments that only require their officers to shoot once a year to qualify. I commend you on your dedication to training.

The Dangerfield, Texas church shooting back in 1980 was way before we realized the need for safety/security teams in churches. The heroic acts by the members in the church were necessary for survival. You may call their acts uncontrolled or unrestrained because at that moment in time that was all they had to fight with and they knew if they didn’t do something there would be more causalities. But I will say again I want someone with a little more gun control when confronting an active shooter in a church. I need them to think, to make sure they identify the target, to acquire the target, know what is behind that target, around that target, what they are shooting with and knowing what that bullet is going to do when it leaves their weapon. That thought process is not uncontrolled or unrestrained, that my brother is a David facing a Goliath and saving those hiding under the pews.

Thanks again for your comments and your service in protecting the flock. If I can ever be of any other assistance let me know.

Jim

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    Jim has many years of law enforcement  experience and has run the safety team at his church for several years. TSA was formed after he realized God's calling when multiple churches reached out and asked him to present at their church. 

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